The Quest for the Legends

The Quest for the Legends Word document is currently 301,878 words. This will be our starting point. This isn't primarily about 50,000 words, of course - if the average chapter remaining is so much shorter than the average chapter so far that there are fewer than 50,000 words left, I'm not going to go pad it out or something - but it's fun to keep a word count anyway.

I actually already started chapter 63 yesterday, but like I said, we're treating this as the starting point, which simply happens to be a bit closer to the end of the fic. I'm hoping to post daily progress posts in the hope that this will shame me into getting a decent word count every day instead of putting it off.

Right. It's on, fic.

I'm probably not done writing for today yet, but so far I'm at 303,960 words, which means 2082 words since yesterday, and chapter 63 is done (as well as the "Chapter 64:" with which the title of chapter 64 starts). Which is a pretty good first day! Only thirteen chapters left.

Also, fun things are happening. There is Robin Riverstone. (Look! She wasn't Random Side Character #451 with too many random personal details!) And Chaletwo is now in May's head. I don't think I'm going to be able to resist making gleeful comments about what I'm writing as I progress, which will probably make increasingly less sense as I go on.

Also also, I am using opaltiger's computer! This is exciting.

Technically I should have posted this (and chapter 62) yesterday, but shush, I was ridiculously tired.

Basically, I didn't get quite as much writing done as I would have wanted because I was traveling most of the day and my laptop's battery was limited. I'm at 305,096 words, which means 3218 words in altogether, which means I'm almost on schedule (115 words behind) thanks to having been comfortably ahead yesterday. And it's the weekend, so I should have plenty of time to get ahead again today.

That being said, I don't think I should deprive you of chapter 62 any longer, so before I get back to frenzied writing, I'm going to make some final tweaks to chapter 62 and get that up. Watch this space.

I should never post chapters while trying to write, because when I post chapters I spend the rest of the day uselessly refreshing the places I posted them. And then suddenly I went and started rereading Morphic extras, which really didn't help.

So I'm still a couple hundred words behind - the current word count is 306,674, which means I've written 1578 words since yesterday if I'm not mathfailing again. I really am hoping to make it up tomorrow, and definitely to finish chapter 64 (one of those chapters that turned out a whole lot longer and more interesting than I thought it would - it had "stuff happens" in its plan, but once I started writing it my brain took that to mean taking on May's issues).

I'm at 308,616 words: 6738 words into November (where I should be at 6667 for regular NaNo, so I'm slightly ahead now), with 1942 written since yesterday. So I'm back on track! Whoo.

(Well, technically it's twenty minutes to four AM, so it's not quite today. But I attended two parties today, so I don't think you can blame me for making up for it by writing into the middle of the night.)

I might still write a bit more before going to sleep - I'm thinking about getting something to eat, and I'd write while eating - but anyway, I'm feeling reasonably good about my progress now, as well as about my determination to write. I finished chapter 64 this afternoon and am on the third page of chapter 65 at the moment; it'll probably be somewhat on the long side so I don't know if I'll finish it tomorrow, but hopefully the day after that.

There are a lot of bits that are going to need substantial additional work during the editing - I'm really feeling the oh-dear-this-is-way-too-fast-to-be-any-good. Remember how I'd edited and posted the entirety of The Fall of a Leader by sometime in January, when I did that for NaNo? Yeah, no, that's not going to happen here. Still expect I'm going to spend my days being I FINISHED MY FIC MUST EDIT enough for it to not take years or something, but definitely longer than TFoaL.

310,362 words now - that's 8484 words written total (I should be at 8333) and 1746 since yesterday. Still doing chapter 65; I just started the seventh page of it. There's a battle going on, which is always good for NaNo because so long as I can concentrate on writing (which I admittedly wish I could for more than ten minutes at a time) they flow a lot quicker than dialogue/character-heavy scenes - the action is much more spontaneous than having to think up vaguely intelligent lines in a conversation.

I haven't read over any of this battle at all yet. Part of me thinks once I do it's not going to make any sense whatsoever. Let's keep it that way. It's NaNo.

I've discovered I kind of like writing Preciure. He might get more lines when I edit.

Meanwhile, holy hell it's late and this is not healthy. I think instead of the past few years where I've kinda sorta intended to do NaNo but it just fizzled out, my brain has now decided that my 1667 (or preferably more) words a day must be finished AT ANY COST and the procrastination I do makes me stay up ridiculously late in the night finishing the writing instead of going to sleep thinking falsely that I can make it up later.

I'm really digging how well I'm keeping this up. After the past several years where I've failed pathetically at pseudo-NaNoing, I thought I might just have lost the ability to write terrible fast nonsense.

I'm at 312,398 words now; I've finished chapter 65 and am now on the third page of chapter 66. That's 2036 words since yesterday and 10,510 total NaNo words, 510 ahead of where I should be assuming 50,000 words for the final product. In terms more in line with what I'm actually doing, I've written just over three chapters out of the nearly fourteen I had left when I started, which is promising since that's more than a fifth - of course, that would be assuming the remaining chapters are about as long as these three, which I have no idea about. The next few chapters are probably the ones I'm most unsure about content-wise; some spur-of-the-moment stuff that happened in the past couple will affect what happens in them, and as always my ideas like to flow best while I'm actually writing the fic so now I've thought of a bunch of things I'd rather do with them than I'd originally planned (which is fine, because I wasn't that wild about the original plan). This will be interesting. Hopefully I can keep up the pace and the result will not be irredeemably nonsensical.

Chapter 72 is probably the next one I've been looking forward to for an appreciable amount of time, so getting to that will be exciting.

Also, it's not quite as ludicrously late as yesterday! Victory!

I have not had a good day today. Lack of sleep and being generally tired at work and then missing half of the evening trying to take a nap and bleh.

I was so tempted to just leave it at the few hundred words I'd typed on the bus to/from work, but because I'm taking this way too seriously, I forced out more words and I'm now at 313,549. I only wrote 1151 words today, swallowing up 505 of the 510 words I'd gotten ahead yesterday, but I'm still on schedule, just barely.

Now to go to SLEEP.

It's mine and Shadey's anniversary today; we went to see Skyfall and I otherwise spent a lot of the day with him. So again, not enough writing. I finished chapter 66, but now it's nearly half past four in the morning and I'm starting to get a headache, so I'm calling it quits even though I'm only at 314,754 words - 1205 today, 457 words behind where I should be for NaNo. I'll do my best to make up for it this weekend.

Even without being part of the revised plan, two interesting things happened as I was writing this chapter: Alan's issues came out like whoa, and despite my having decided several times that Mitch was not going to be in this chapter, he was in it anyway. So in the end this chapter is wayyyyy far off what I originally intended it to be. I barely even remember what it was supposed to be. Something that didn't seem like it could fill a chapter.

Right. No update yesterday because I was sick, slept most of the day, and only managed to write a few hundred words in the evening.

Today I've been doing a whole lot more writing, however, and now I'm at 317,552 words, which is 2798 since the last update two days ago. That's still 435 words behind what I ought to have written in two days, and being that I was already behind at that point I'm now 992 words behind the goal (I'm at 15674 words so far in November where I should be at 16666), but considering I lost almost a whole day there on top of an existing slip, I think I could be doing a lot worse.

I just finished chapter 67 (unless I decide to reconsider the chapter splits, which I might). The end is in sight - this was a problematic chapter to write because of its somewhat transitionary nature, but now that that's past, chapter 68 is fairly well defined now, and chapters 69 and 70 should be basically according to the chapter plan. So from there it's back on track, and hopefully I can catch up fairly soon.

With chapter 67, I've also now written nearly five chapters out of fourteen left during NaNo, which fits fairly nicely with the fact we're now a third of the way through November.

I'm at 319,595 words, or 17,717 words into November, when the NaNoWriMo target is 18,333. That means I'm 616 words behind, having written 2043 words today and cut down my lag by more than a third. Whoo.

Chapter 68 has been fairly smooth sailing. Some transitional material, some of which may end up being cut if I decide the flow works without it, but it has both Sparky and Carl in it, which has been making a lot of it write itself. I've been in a really good writing mood today and yesterday, probably partly because of the prospect of Sparky and Carl. Unfortunately, though that would be lovely, it's not so much in the sense of managing to write for very long uninterrupted (though I did manage quite a bit in one session just earlier, I also managed to waste a couple of hours rereading the entirety of chapters 1-3 of Unsounded - highly recommended, by the way - because the PDF version of the print edition that I backed on Kickstarter just came out). But it's a really good writing mood in the sense that I feel like my output for these days has some reasonably non-terrible bits (well, non-terrible for me, at any rate) and they flow pretty naturally given I am writing, as opposed to the slogging, tortuous 'just shut up and write some words that say something like what's happening' thing my NaNo experience otherwise consists of.

Granted, this did come at the cost of going to sleep ridiculously late again. But at least unlike some of the previous days here I wasn't actually that tired, instead of staying up watching my sanity slip and my eyes dry into dust as I tried to type something coherent.

321,312 words, 1717 today. That's 19,434 words total for November where I should be at 20,000, or 566 words behind. I'm slowly but steadily catching up.

Chapter 68 is not done yet, but it's on page nine. I might move a scene that was supposed to be in this chapter to chapter 69 instead, in which case I'm on the last scene of the chapter; otherwise it's the second-to-last. Or, you know, I might shuffle these chapter splits around even more.


I took a nap today, where I had yet another dream about finishing the fic. In it, the end involved there being a bunch of legendary eggs, many of them shiny; most of them had already hatched, but one still remained, and there was a bunch of suspense around what was in the last egg. In the closing scene, it dramatically turned out to be a Togepi. When I woke up I was thinking, "Wait, that ending really isn't any good. I need to make up a new one, quick." Thankfully I then remembered that wasn't the real thing.

In the meantime (in the dream, not the actual fic) there was something with psychics ruling the world (I think my brain was mixing it up with Negrek's Clouded Sky) and Mitch being a Dark-type and sneakily taking down the psychic leader, which led to the reputation of invincibility that had been holding up the psychics' reign being broken as the story spread. This was somewhat bittersweet, as while the characters didn't like the psychics' reign, they felt making them lose everything in such a manner was cruel.

323,090 words. That's 1778 today, and I'm now behind the goal of 323,544 (a.k.a. 21,666 NaNo words) by only 454 words. Still keeping it up!

Chapter 69 might be more interesting than I thought; we'll see where this conversation goes. (God, I can't believe I'm almost at chapter 70 after which it's the LAST FIVE-CHAPTER ARC THING.)

325,004 words. 1914 words written today, 23,126 done altogether, only 207 words behind the NaNo goal of 23,333. I expect to catch up tomorrow.

Chapter 69 is finished, and I'm a couple of pages into chapter 70, which incidentally means I'm now done with more than half of what I had remaining at the beginning of November, chapter-wise. Which fits pretty nicely with the fact it's the fourteenth of November (well, technically six in the morning of the fifteenth, but that's because of my screwed-up sleep patterns).

I took a shower today and had a sudden burst of inspiration for making chapter 70 more interesting than it was meant to be, which was great; I'm now looking considerably forward to finishing this chapter. And then it's the freaking last five-chapter arc. This is insane. I can't believe I'm doing this.

326,948 words. Which means I am past the NaNoWriMo halfway point (I'm at 25,070 words total), which means I am officially caught up and in fact ahead of the goal by 70 words, having written 1944 words today. It's not even as ridiculously late as usual!

I'm on the sixth page of the chapter. This battle has a completely ridiculous number of Pokémon in it; I'm mostly looking forward to getting to the end of it because of that shower-inspiration I talked about yesterday. And because then it's the LAST FIVE-CHAPTER ARC NO I'M STILL NOT OVER THAT.

opal keeps trying to blackmail me into giving him the chapters as I go. Tell him he's silly. >:(

>:( Is this a coup?

With the combination of work, dinner with my family to celebrate my brother's birthday immediately after work, and Wreck-It Ralph immediately after that, I had basically no free time today. And then I had to fix my site and then I fell asleep. Will try to make up for it tomorrow, when I have absolutely nothing I'm supposed to be doing.

Also, writing this battle is a lot more of a headache than I thought. I've almost spent more time organizing it in my planning document so that it will make some sense than actually writing it.

329,674 words. Not quite caught up after yesterday (I should be at 330,211), but despite spending most of today in the unwritingest mood ever, I eventually managed to cough up 2726 words and finish chapter 70. That last bit is terrible; I'm going to have to edit the hell out of it, but I still really like the concept.

Last night I lay awake in bed for an hour or two unable to sleep because my brain insisted on thinking about the ending of the fic, and some things actually came together in a way they hadn't before. It's strange how even when writing things ridiculously fast and badly, I'm having roughly the same amount of actual ideas as I would have in the time it would have taken me to write these chapters at my normal pace. I worried a bit about that before I started; it seemed like the bits of the chapter plan that I was unsatisfied with or uncertain about would simply stay that way if I was trying to NaNo this, without my usual thing with getting sudden ideas as I'm writing. But it's working way better than I could have hoped.

Anyway, I am now writing THE LAST FIVE-CHAPTER ARC. I still haven't quite worked out what to title it; the possibilities that have occurred to me don't quite fit in with "The Pokémon Festival" and "The Ouen League".

I'm at 331,417 words now - unfortunately not caught up yet, since I only managed 1743 words today, but hopefully I can continue to whittle that down in the next days (I'm at 29,539 words right now for November, where I ought to be at 30,000, so I'm 461 words behind).

This is a really nostalgic part of the story - basically everything happening right now is calling back to some of the early chapters. On the one hand, this made me reread some of those early chapters and discover gems of my fourteen-year-old self's writing such as "A bearded man, most of his bearded face hidden in shadow" and "She didn’t say anything to him and they just walked down the stairs, ignoring each other very ironically." On the other hand, when I was going to reference how May came with Mark to confront the Mew Hunter largely because he'd also stolen her Larvitar, I discovered that that never happened, because apparently the version I was remembering was the UMR and I took that part out in the ILCOE. (Originally, they had a full five-on-five battle in Rainbow Woods, leading to all of Mark's Pokémon fainting, and May lent him Larvitar for the rest of the journey, leading to the Mew Hunter stealing him when he stole Mark's Pokéballs; in the ILCOE, I decided the full battle was unnecessary, cut it down to just Dratini vs. Larvitar, and removed the bit about Mark having Larvitar entirely.) It was pretty strange; the ILCOE has been the official version of the fic for so long that things that used to be in the UMR - like Mark randomly encountering the Waraider herd near Ruxido sometime in chapter 28 or so - tend to slip my memory entirely until I start thinking about that version specifically. This weird reversal of that principle has never happened before.

It is so weird to be writing this. It's seemed like this way distant vague future something for so many years.

I'm going to be editing and posting them one by one. "Finishing" in NaNoWriMo doesn't mean you're done and just have to worry about posting the chapters - the output is inevitably mostly crap and needs to be severely reworked into a presentable form that makes sense.

The editing will presumably not take nearly as long as it would have taken me writing the chapters from scratch, but from your end it's going to look like I'm just writing a bit faster than usual - the updates are going to be one at a time, in order, on a when-it's-done basis.